PUT-IN-BAY, Ohio — Slowly but surely, Stone Lab is reducing its dependency on the grid.

Over time, the solar energy collected by the lab on Gibraltar Island on Lake Erie is expected to
reduce conventional energy consumption at its facilities between 10 and 25 percent.

Solar panels are near the shoreline, on the roof of the classroom building and on the roof of
the adjacent research pavilion. The panels along with low-flush toilets, low-flow showerheads and a
solar-thermal project in the dining hall, which produces almost all of the building’s hot water,
have helped reduce energy costs. But that’s not the only reason they were adopted.

“This gives students the hands-on ability to look at solar panels in action and show how
important sustainable energy is,” said Christopher Winslow, assistant director of the Ohio Sea
Grant College program at Ohio State University. “Solar is the new wave, it’s the new exciting
thing, and what this platform provides is the ability to do extensive research on it.”

The solar-electricity project at Stone Lab was split into two phases, the first of which went
live on June 13, 2012, and featured the construction of a solar pavilion, an outdoor classroom that
produces solar energy and additional solar panels mounted on the ground.

Half of the pavilion’s 44 panels are monocrystalline silicon, made up of solar cells with one
silicon crystal. They tend to produce slightly more solar energy on cloudy days than other styles.
The other half are polycrystalline silicon, created with multiple silicon crystals. They are
slightly less efficient. Researchers are comparing the two.

The six research panels on the ground can be manually tilted to different angles to experiment
with the effectiveness of various positions, said Matt Thomas, the lab’s manager.

Because the lab’s focus is research, the installation process was quite a bit different from
most others, said Dave Leahy, director of sales at Dovetail Solar and Wind and the project manager
of the pavilion’s installation.

“Most of the time, people just want to know how to get the lowest costs and go with what’s best
for them,” Leahy said. “It took a little bit more time with this because they wanted to know about
all of the different possibilities and tried to feature several of them in the design.”

Leahy said the Stone Lab panels are connected to machinery that tracks the electricity produced
over time.

Additional solar panels were installed atop the Stone Lab classroom building in October 2013
during the project’s second phase. Those panels are high-efficiency models that employ different
solar strategies by row, allowing for comparison.

None of the electricity is stored, so what’s not used during the day when it is generated is
lost. Cloudy days pose a problem as well, which is why the lab stays on the grid — for now.

The region’s access to sun during the spring and summer months makes the lab an ideal location
for solar experimentation and research, Thomas said. “We really have some of the ideal solar
capacity in Ohio.”

Eventually, officials there would like to expand their sustainable-energy sources to other
buildings on Gibraltar Island, such as the dormitories, and potentially beyond. They’re also trying
to make data collected from the solar panels more accessible online so it can be better used in
research.